Editorial: Commission erred in dropping background checks

Posted: Thursday, September 06, 2007

The debate over whether to require background checks for bar doormen should have ended Tuesday as soon as Police Chief Jack Lumpkin told the Athens-Clarke County mayor and commission his officers had arrested a convicted sex offender who held one of those jobs, a revelation he punctuated with the starkly unassailable observation, "I don't think the fathers of Georgia sent their daughters here to have their daughters present IDs to sex offenders."

At that point, commissioners should have voted unanimously in favor of mandating background checks for doormen. Yet what they did was continue to discuss the issue - the major sticking point in a revamped alcohol ordinance designed in part to get some control over underaged drinking - until they came up with a logically incoherent proposal to dump the proposed background checks but raise the minimum age for working in a bar from 18 to the legal drinking age of 21.

Thus, what the community is left with is an ordinance that embraces the wishful thinking that maturity and responsibility are somehow magically conferred upon someone the moment the 21st candle is inserted into their birthday cake, but rejects the fact-based notion that someone who has passed a criminal background check, although they may be under 21, has presented at least some tangible proof of maturity and responsibility to the community.

Granted, Lumpkin's revelation regarding the arrest of a sex offender working as a bar doorman was a bit sensationalistic, and its scary point - that, sometimes, young women are going to cross the paths of sexual offenders -was ancillary to the underaged drinking issue the mayor and commission were addressing Tuesday night.

But here's what else Lumpkin had to say about the role that background checks on doormen could play - or, more properly now, could have played - in keeping underaged people out of bars. Prior to Tuesday's vote, Lumpkin told the mayor and commission, "We in the police department believe it (background checks) will improve the overall caliber of people we have watching the doors. We believe that individuals with notable arrests and convictions have a pattern of behavior that suggests that they may not adhere .. to our ordinances and laws."

The police chief went on to suggest that doormen with criminal backgrounds could be willing to skirt those local rules by, for instance, accepting money to admit an underage person into a bar, or by simply not paying strict attention to their job responsibilities.

Under the commission-instituted rubric for establishing who can and cannot work as a doorman in a local bar, a 21-year-old high-school dropout with an underage possession or DUI conviction in his or her past would be a perfectly acceptable candidate for checking IDs. On the other hand, a 19- or 20-year-old Army reservist with a clean criminal record, just back from a tour of duty in Iraq and looking to earn some college money, won't be able to get near a doorman's job in Athens-Clarke County come July, when the alcohol ordinance's provisions for doormen are set to become effective.

Granted, the hypothetical résumés above, in and of themselves, aren't necessarily reliable predictors of job performance. But they do serve to illustrate that the commission's Tuesday vote sets up a criterion for employment as a bar doorman that could well keep some eminently qualified person out of a job, while opening that same job to a person of dubious character. That, in turn, highlights the clear probability the commission has failed utterly to grasp an opportunity to strengthen one of the primary lines of defense in keeping underaged people out of bars.

Three Athens-Clarke County commissioners - Kathy Hoard, Harry Sims and George Maxwell - were able to recognize Tuesday that background checks for doormen, while not foolproof, are a means of providing the community with at least some assurance that admission to local bars is being closely monitored. The fact that six other commissioners - Commissioner Carl Jordan did not attend Tuesday's session - couldn't bring themselves to reach that same self-evident conclusion is troubling indeed.